Tetris Study Reveals Dreaming's Role In Memory

Cy Guy was one of the legion who wrote with this news: "Dr. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, released results of a study of amnesiacs who had played Tetris. Though they dreamed about playing the game (as is common), they failed to improve. Stickgold hypothesizes that dreaming uses the long-term memory area that the amnesiacs retained rather that the short-term memory areas of the brain that were damaged. More information on the study is available from this Reuters article, and Harvard Med School's Focus magazine." This is not what I dream about no matter how much tetris I've played.

Comments

dreaming

[austad]

When I worked for Walmart, I would dream about UPC symbols because I was a stockperson for awhile. When I took calculus in college, I constantly dreamed about math. And now, I dream about programming and routing. Sometimes when my alarm goes off and I'm still tired I'll dream it's a bug in the code and I have to fix it, or that it's a router beeping and I need to make route changes to fix it.

Then I'll mumble something about it to my girlfriend and she thinks I'm on crack. I work too much.

Re:Dreaming about games

[Pfhreakaz0id]

It's calleed letting your subconcious solve problems. Remember, your subconcious can go right on thinking while your concious brain is sleeping or otherwise engaged. I used to be into meditation when I was in college, and I would use this technique to help me organize the vast amounts of research I did into a coherent structure for a paper. I would go into meditation, instruct my subconcious to work on a problem, and a few days later, sit down and write out a perfect outline, or bang out a great short-paper. or whatever. I got pretty good at it. You may think this is bullshit. But it worked. Great.

I don't recall any of the books I read, but I was SERIOUS about it. I meditated daily for 20 minutes. I should get back into that. It was fun.
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Mind - Brain Interaction

[frank249]

"Dreams are the mind watching the brain processing memories," Stickgold says.

Actually the mind does more than just watch. There has been some recent research on mind - brain interaction. When we go to sleep there is some part of us that some refer to as the 'mind' that stays awake or alert. If the parts of the brain are the hardware, the mind is the operating system. It monitors our bodily systems and does some of the housekeeping chores while we sleep. There has been lots of research on biological clocks and why some people seem to be able to wake up before their alarm goes off. The big question was how does the mind communicate with the body? Recent research indicates that the mind uses the stress reaction as a way to wake up the body. Stress hormones 'arouse' the body systems like breathing, blood pressure, heart rate etc.

Researchers confirmed this in lab tests. They had two groups of test subjects wired in a sleep lab. The first group were told that they were to be woken up at 8:00AM. At 07:30 they noticed that levels of stress hormones started to gradually increase and by 08:00 reached a peak. In the second group, the subjects were also told that they were to be woken at 08:00 but instead were woken at 06:00AM. Prior to waking the subjects stress hormones levels were low but immediately after being woken unexpectedly the stress levels rose dramatically to peak levels.

What is still unclear is whether dreaming is caused by stress hormones or are used by the mind to induce the stress reaction.

Whatever the function of dreaming is, it doesn't require us to remember. Not remembering dreams is like dubbing tapes with the volume turned down," he explains. "The underlying process still gets carried out.

I would have to disagree with the author on this point. Many people remember their dreams. The trick is to write notes immediately after waking as the memory of the dream seems to fade quickly.

this also explains

[Lord Omlette]

all those funky starcraft dreams i've been having...

there he is zerglings, get him!
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057

Dreams

[jbarnett]

If you stay up for extended amounts of time, denying yourself REM sleep, the body forces REM "sleep" or REM funcation on the waking body.

This is why moderators^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H crack addicts seems so "weird". There "inbox" is full and all the data from their "inbox" needs to be filed though REM sleep, without sleep for days (even weeks), the mind has to purge their "inbox" while the person is still wake. This is why they "see" or "hear" things that aren't real.

Also what is instersting, is that if you deny yourself REM sleep for an extended amount of time (like not sleeping ANY for days or weeks), then when you finally do sleep, the REM part of sleep will be "stronger" and last longer. A way for the mind to (apparently) catch up on REM sleep.

Also an intersting fact (err theogry, I don't remember who came up with this theogry), is that when they did a study on schizopheric (sp?) vs "normal" people, schizopheric indivauls had less REM sleep and for shorter intervauls. His theogry was that this "visions" and "voices" that schizopheric indivauls where expeirence was that the mind did "know" when the right time to induce REM sleep, and that schizopheric indivauls where suffering from a funcation in the brain that induce REM "sleep" at the wrong time. Also part of his theogry was that if you could force REM "sleep" on schizopheric indivauls when they where REALLY sleeping, that alot, if not most (but not all) schizopheric effects in the indivauls would be greatly reduced to non-exist.

He theogry is yet proven. It makes some sense.

Also, this is a fact (don't have a reference though) is that when you sleep, you rotate between "deep" and REM sleep, every 90 minutes or so you going into REM sleep for awhile, then back into deep sleep. This is repeated till you wake up. There isn't ONE REM sleep, but 2-5 during your sleep cycle depending on how long you sleep and other factors can have effects it, the length of it, or the quality of it.

What I want to do, is that REM sleep (to me atleast, this isn't a fact, just my BS) is simplair to an LSD trip. What I would like to test, if have some one (I would do it!) study and work like normal, but at night instead of 8 hours sleep, do 2 hours sleep and then take LSD for the other time. Do a before and after type of thing. Get some material, some subject, it doesn't matter what, lets say LISP or small talk. And in the "normal" (without LSD), find a way to judge how much one learns during this time. Then during the "trip" days find a way to judge how much one learns during the time.

Just wondering how LSD effect memory, since it appears (atleast to myself) to have like effect of those during REM sleep.

Actucally I just want to do LSD and play teteris and call it "research".

"No I am not freaking out man, holy crap, I am Jesus Christ for MY sake and you won't leave me alone to play teteris? You go now!"

Dreaming about games

[FortKnox]

I've a pretty serious gamer... my experience with dreaming about a game is this:
I dream about spots I have difficulty completing. And sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with the solution. I write it down, go back to sleep, then try it the next day and it works!
This was when I was a kid playing "Quest for Glory" and games in the "adventure" genre. Tetris, though? I don't think so...


-- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's .sigs??

Re:dreaming

[RhetoricalQuestion]

If you dreamed about your girlfriend as much as you dreamed about work, she wouldn't think you were on crack.

Then again, if you spent enough time with your girlfriend such that you started dreaming about her instead of work, you'd probably be fired and subsequently dumped for being an unemployed bum.

Then you'd have no girlfriend and no job, but your dreams would be WAY more fun.

Hmm...

[jonfromspace]

"Dreams are just the body's way of clearing out the mental ''in-box'', Stickgold said."

Ok, now all we have to do is code a little VBS Dream Virus, which when the brain is clearing it's "in-box", will be relayed into other peoples dreams, and so-on... thus creating a pseudo-mind-control method... First Virus... - Vote Gore.

Related.

[Matt2000]

There was a related study done of amnesiacs who hated tetris and then were forced to play tetris. Not only did they remember that they hate tetris, but over 73% of them asked to be made an amnesiac again so that they could forget that the evil Russians had ever made the game.

Amongst female college students, over 70% of them dreamed of tetris, but failed to improve. However, Dr. Stickgold hypothesised that the over 14 hours of daily Minesweeper play might have interfered.

Perspective from a Cognitive Neuroscientist

[big.ears]

What really surprises me about this is that the amnesics did not improve. One consistent finding is that your standard temporal-lobe amnesic has trouble with declarative, not procedural memory. (i.e. they would not remember playing tetris the next day, but they they would play better.) Something is probably wrong with their experiment if amnesics did not improve.

It has long been known that sleep affects memory consolidation. For instance, we all fall asleep every night, but we almost never remember falling asleep, or the events that take place up to about five minutes before. In fact, a lot of people who claim that they 'have conversations while asleep' or 'sleepwalk' are actually awake during this time, but they don't consolidate those memories and so don't remember it.

I have a dream...

[64.28.67.48]

I have a dream where little oddly-blocks are not judged by the color of their surface, but by their ascii character-equivalents.

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